There’s a fair amount of people in this thread talking about how lucky the police were to stop the sniper, but it wasn’t really luck, it was hard work and being willing to investigate everything. The fact is, no ongoing campaign is going to be perfect, and sooner or later they will make a mistake that they possibly don’t even realise is a mistake. And the investigators are looking at everything.
Except that the app would have to be running *before *the shot was fired in order to hear the sound. Snipers usually only fire once. For a wartime system, it would be worth having on all the time, but no smartphone app is going to be able to listen perpetually–among other things, it would run afoul of privacy advocates.
If people are ducking when they pump gas and otherwise going out of their usual routine because of fear, installing an app and sacrificing a little theoretical privacy is not such a big step.
You could also set up the app so that it listens all the time, then prompts you with “I think I heard a gun shot. Send this to the FBI along with your date and location?” That way, even the voluntary installers have to take another step to reveal any information.
I mean lucky, in the sense that Muhammad and Malvo made some very clear mistakes in their spree. They actually drew suspicion a few times and were spotted at several of the scenes, but they didn’t start making those connections until later, though hurt a lot by initial false reports of the van, but it is something more modern technology and police work will uncover because they could more easily track and correlate people in the vicinity of the shootings. This is where I think spreading out more would have mitigated some of that. They were spotted at multiple scenes because police were able to respond quickly. I think this is why they went down into Richmond.
I also think one of the biggest mistakes that they made was deliberately leaving notes and evidence behind for the police. Seriously, leaving the Death tarot card and saying “Call me God” is like something straight out of a comic book or some suspense/thriller cop movie.
So, I have to wonder, what if someone did something like that, but perhaps made a full road-trip out of their spree. If they had no previous record, used cash, and were careful to go through one town to fuel up and get supplies, then go to some other random place and shoot someone, and never made any effort to communicate. Could police all over the country really be in a heightened awareness state to respond quickly enough to catch them and make those connections if they were even having difficulty with that in the DC metro area, which has well above national average funding for law enforcement? I’m sure they’d still make mistakes, but surely it’s even harder to connect those mistakes when the evidence is literally spread all over the country.
I’m wondering, though, if someone who is psychologically capable of commiting acts like that is really able to approach it in such a way so that he could limit mistakes and not feel the need to leave behind letters and evidence or a manifesto or whatever that seems to be fairly common. In short, I think it might be possible to evade capture and conviction much longer, perhaps indefinitely, just probably not by the type of people who would actually do it.
It only took a few hours for all of the above flaws and loopholes to emerge. Our suspect is reading this at this very moment, and making plans that would defeat all the defenses that have so far been proposed.
There are people in the USA who own literally hundreds of guns, and go on forums like this and brag about it. One of them could shoot a person in a different state every couple of days with a different gun, and different plates on his vehicle. There are tens of thousands of people driving around the country living in recreational vehicles. Have stockpiles of a dozen weapons at each of a dozen bases, and never be carrying more than two or three guns at a time. Maybe keep an old car at each base, too., and switch those. One could easily kill 500 people in a couple of years in seemingly random locations and leave no clues, and never use the same gun more than once every few months.
That was certainly my worry. But I suspect if it got into the dozens of victims even, certainly into the triple digits, there would be a wide hue and cry for fourth amendment stuff to be suspended. I suppose there could be safe zones where people could voluntarily be searched before they entered them; and anyone who wanted to preserve their privacy would stay out if those and just take their chances of being shot.
I’m moving this from General Questions to IMHO, where people can give their opinions.
samclem moderator
This will be the downfall of any future sniper/serial killer to keep them from doing it indefinitely. There is always the moment of stupidity or bad luck.
e.g.
- Ted Bundy would have killed forever if not for X.
- The snipers would have continued forever if not for Y.
True, but after killing so many times, an X or a Y will be bound to happen.
I’m much more concerned about a “Mumbai terrorist attack” then a sniper(s) - much more effective and dramatic then a sniper.
A couple of dedicated teams could storm a “gun free” zone like a school or any large gathering in NYC/Boston etc - the majority would be sitting ducks. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.
Gunchris, I worry about that too and tend to think of a large mall in the holiday season. If shooters were at each exit they would be able to potentially kill hundreds. Once again, I wonder if something like that would tip the balance toward a constitutional amendments to modify the Fourth Amendment, or some sort of workaround where people could voluntarily enter areas where they would agree to forfeit those protections. Though if it were done in the latter way, if many places of employment and public accommodation were within such zones, it could become a tricky constitutional issue.
Isn’t that a bit like the anthropic principle? Do we know for sure that there are no serial killers who go on indefinitely killing without ever giving caught? I find that proposition dubious.
Couldn’t one study the serial killers that are caught by making a dumb mistake and estimate the ‘half-life’ of a killer’s career? And then come up with a decent estimate of what fraction will go X years or Y bodies before an arrest.
I wouldn’t be completely shocked if some small fraction of careful or infrequent serial killers made it to the old age home without being caught.
There are some killings that are believed to be linked to serial killers for which a killer was never found. That’s as close to answering your question as we can get. We don’t really know what happened. Maybe they stopped voluntarily, or committed suicide. Maybe they had a heart attack. Maybe they were arrested for something else and never linked to those killings. But it’s also conceivable that they packed up and started over in another country, or changed their MO enough so that no one linked the crimes.
I think it’s virtually impossible for anyone could stay put and kill indefinitely without being caught, though. Hypothesizing some “perfect serial killer” is asking for a contradiction, like asking for a material that is both heavy and lightweight. If these people were able to function at that level, they’d channel that urge into military careers or something.
Well, the gizmos in question are of two different kinds: one is for big-time security like presidential inaugurations, the other (mobile unit) is for battlefield counter-sniper use. Both are intended to almost instantly pinpoint a shot’s origin so that resources can be directed toward neutralizing the sniper (either by getting the protectee under cover and apprehending a suspect, or by drenching the sniper’s position with bullets and explosives, depending on which use we’re talking about). I expect either system could easily be adapted to give police a huge head-start on chasing a Beltway sniper type, and I expect massive public support for such monitoring. I think police already use a shotspotter-type system in some high-crime neighborhoods. Hell, a Google search makes it look like even small cities are installing it all over the place.
Meh. Such teams could storm the NRA headquarters or a gun show with similar results. John Hinckley, Jr. showed us that a dumpy moron with obvious visual tells could still get the drop on the world’s best-trained guard detail while on high alert.
Don’t forget the recently sentenced Ft. Hood shooter.
Apparently they were not expecting a dumpy moron with (apparently not so) obvious visual tells.
(Ft. Hood not really comparable. That was fratricidal attack by a member of the force itself, who would not be challenged; in a CONUS base, inside the perimeter, troops in garrison are not armed except for MPs/guards)
And no arming of the general populace would be of any help in the scenario that the thread focuses upon, where the whole strategy is to pick off individuals from ambush, NOT to engage in a battle.
Then in that case, why would anyone ever connect the crimes and realize that there’s a serial killer? In that case, per the OP, why would anyone start demanding civil liberties be curtailed or go around with tinted windows? There are certainly enough gun crimes in the U.S. already.
Because most gun crimes do not involve situations where seemingly random victims are shot in public without anyone seeing a shooter.
No one would ever hear about half to three-quarters of those cases, though, especially if there’s no apparent connection between them. Especially if the shooters picked the “right” victims.
Don’t apps like Siri on the Iphone and Google Now on android listen all the time to be activated by voice commands?
The apps could be modified to listen to Gun shots
No, you have to tell them to listen (usually with some sort of long press). Can you imagine the news stories if it were otherwise? “Your iPhone is spying on you!” “Apple is listening to you have sex!” “Congressional hearings over iPhone ‘bugging’?” “A sack full of iPhones can be used as a blunt instrument to kill people with!” (None of these articles would ever mention non-iPhones doing the same thing.)
But mostly there’d just be too many “potential gun shot” sounds in the world to filter out, and you’d need to have at least 2-3 people in range of the shot who happened to be running the app to triangulate it, and even that would require that the GPSes be set to “battery hog” high-precision mode in order to allow the location identification. I’m not saying it’s not a neat idea, just that it’s not feasible with current technology.